Arms and Legs by Chloe Lane

Author:Chloe Lane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallic Books

A few years after the summer in my childhood when the forest was burned, I was running through the part that had survived with my brother Gerard. I’d been playing out there with a friend, and I’d left my watch beside a pond where we’d been fishing for eels. The watch, a Casio with a black leather strap, was a gift from my parents on my ninth birthday. Gerard knew the fastest route to the pond from where my mother was waiting on the road beside our car, so he led the way. I followed behind, keeping pace as we ran in and out of the pines, not sticking to any kind of path. We reached the pond and retrieved the watch, which was sitting on a mound of pine needles exactly where I’d left it. The sun was going down.

On the way back to the car, Gerard and I got turned around. I watched him change tack once, twice. I heard him mutter ‘No, no, no’, as he glanced behind him to make sure I was still there. Only a few months before, the skeletal remains of a young woman had been found in the same forest. She’d been missing for three years, and her body had been found not exactly where we were lost now, but amongst these trees and in our community. I understood little of what had happened, of the crime, but hearing the name of our town in the news was both exciting and terrifying, and that feeling had stuck with me. Out there during the day with my friend, it had been far from my thoughts, but now as the sun was starting to drop, and with Gerard clearly panicking too, it filled me with worry. I thought we might never escape. When we eventually emerged fifty yards down the road from where our mother was parked, I was quietly sobbing. As we walked along the verge towards our waving and smiling mother, Gerard bent sideways and vomited into the ditch. When he was done he looked at me and wiped his hand across his mouth. ‘That was scary,’ he said. I can’t think of another time in our lives where he presented himself so wholly to me. It filled me with fear and joy at once. ‘Yeah, it was,’ I said. He nodded, and we never spoke of it again.

The two sides of this memory – the initial fear of being lost in the forest with the skeletal remains, and the feeling of my brother giving so much of himself to me – caught me out. I needed to call him, my brother. And it made me think that there was some truth in the shared experience of fear followed by the relief of coming out the other side together, because from that day on it seemed like Gerard took me more seriously, that my presence bugged him less. I was afraid of so much, but what about Dan? What did he fear? It occurred to me with some surprise that I didn’t know.

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